{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Tech Stories Tech Brief By HackerNoon","title":"The Zero-Cost AI Stack for Developers in 2026","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/0aeb6d00\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3101,"description":"\n        This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/the-zero-cost-ai-stack-for-developers-in-2026.\nThe 10 genuinely free AI inference providers in 2026 — no credit card ever. Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT-OSS 120B, Devstral 2 and more. Step-by-step guide.\nCheck more stories related to tech-stories at: https://hackernoon.com/c/tech-stories.\n            You can also check exclusive content about #llms, #free-inference, #free-ai-providers, #google-ai-studio, #cerebras, #groq, #nvidia-nim, #hugging-face,  and more.\nThis story was written by: @thomascherickal. Learn more about this writer by checking @thomascherickal's about page,\n            and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.\nSkip to the Point\n\nIf you have 90 seconds:\n\nYou can run frontier AI models today - no credit card, no expiry, no tricks. \n\nHere are the ten providers and the single reason to care about each:\n\n\nGoogle AI Studio — Gemini 3.5 Flash (GA, May 2026). 1,500 req/day, 1M context window, multimodal. Start here.\n\nGroq — GPT-OSS 120B at 476 tokens/sec via custom LPU silicon. Fastest streaming anywhere.\n\nCerebras — 1M tokens/day free, ~3,000 tokens/sec on GPT-OSS 120B. Highest free daily volume on Earth.\n\nOpenRouter — One API key, 30+ free models, automatic fallback routing. Maximum model variety.\n\nMistral AI — ~1B tokens/month, Devstral 2 (72.2% SWE-bench), EU data residency. Best for GDPR + agentic coding.\n\nHugging Face — 200,000+ models. Embeddings, audio, domain-specific fine-tunes. Find anything.\n\nCloudflare Workers AI — Llama 4 Scout + Kimi K2.6 across 300+ global edge nodes. Lowest latency for distributed users.\n\nSambaNova — Llama 3.1 405B on a permanent free tier. Biggest open-weight model available free.\n\nGitHub Models — GPT-4.1 + Claude Opus 3.5, free, via your existing GitHub account. Only place to get frontier proprietary models free.\n\nNVIDIA NIM — 80+ models including MiniMax M2.7 (230B), Qwen3 Coder 480B, DeepSeek V4 Flash. Deepest multi-domain...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/IuqXIpaNNuezY7jNfIDnL5gqB1iL_SEndwUUzLGdljY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDI5LzE2ODM1/ODM0NjQtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}